This kind of Kafkaesque behaviour is what I've come to expect from any kind of online services. It's also why I won't use anything that cannot be setup offline.
Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#182As someone using Linux to build web applications, I wonder what about the Apple ecosystem could make it worth to have such a Damocles’ sword hanging over me my whole life. Am I missing something? My current perspective is that not only am I free of all the hassle that comes with building for a closed ecosystem, such as managing a developer account and using proprietary tools, it also comes with much harder distributi…
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Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#183Email Tim Cook (serious)
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I run a separate Mac Mini that has the full iCloud Photos library on a massive external drive, set to "Download originals". I then rsync that filesystem to a separate Linux box. This works but you must not ever disconnect the external drive. I don't have a solution for iCloud Drive, as there wasn't a keep offline setting last time I checked. So use it only ephemerally.
I'm not familiar with the "Photos Library.app", but I have an m4 mini with my photos in a Photo's Library. I'd love to know your script to rsync the photos into a separate drive/directory
The Photos library "file" is just a big folder, I just sync the whole thing.
#!/bin/sh rsync --iconv=utf-8-mac,utf-8 -avh --delete-after --partial --progress /Volumes/myExternalDrive/Photos\ Library.photoslibrary myuser@mylinuxmachine.local:"/srv/myExternalDriveBackup/"
(note: tested with brew rsync, IIRC the default rsync is outdated on macOS)
Somewhere in the directory structure is a folder /originals/ which has all the actual files.
Note that this is only a last resort backup. Restoring the library as a whole requires a Mac with a compatible OS version. Restoring without a Mac would only get you the originals, so only the out-of-camera files (jpg, heic, raw), with no edits or metadata changes from Apple Photos applied (Apple Photos doesn't touch the EXIF data). You'd probably also lose the video part of all live photos, as the live video files stored as separate files and not part of the .heic files. They're there, but not very usable.
An alternative to this workflow is to export all photos (with edits applied) from the Photos app, but honestly I'm not sure if that even works and how long it would take for multi-TB libraries.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#185To paraphrase an old saying: Live by Big Tech, die by Big Tech. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer I've heard others say this (and was a "loyal advocate" of Windows for around 2 decades myself), but the reality is they simply do not care. You are merely a single user out of several billion . Many of the reps I’ve spoken to have suggested strange things That almost sounds like some sort of AI, not a human. But…
This is why I don't use an os that depends on cloud functionality built into the os for much of its fuctionality. It's really stupid IMHO to depend on a closed system like this to store data.
I don’t think it is stupid but the golden rule is multiple backups. I personally believe 3 backups is the minimum. A physical one and 2 others. Either another physical copy stored at another location to protect against things like fire or 2 cloud backups to prevent situations like this. But I have only ever met one person who did this. His house burned to the ground and lost all data at his house but had back ups at his brother and on some cloud service and lost nothing. I was impressed as most people I know have zero back ups.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#186The emojis in the support chat are insane.
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#187As someone using Linux to build web applications, I wonder what about the Apple ecosystem could make it worth to have such a Damocles’ sword hanging over me my whole life. Am I missing something? My current perspective is that not only am I free of all the hassle that comes with building for a closed ecosystem, such as managing a developer account and using proprietary tools, it also comes with much harder distributi…
And that website is hosted somewhere, you’re using several layers of network providers, the registrar has control over your domain, the copper in the ground most likely has an easement controlling access to it so your internet provider literally can just cut off access to you whenever they want, if you publish your apps to a registry the registry controls your apps as well. There are so many companies that control ac…
Not wanting centralization under one company does not equal advocating for "trustless society".
All the things you mentioned (registrars, ISPs, registries, etc) have multiple alternative providers you can choose from. Get cut off from GCP, move to AWS. Get banned in Germany, VPS in Sweden. Domain registration revoked, get another domain.
Lose your Apple ID, and you're locked out of the entire Apple ecosystem, permanently, period.
Even if a US federal court ordered that you could never again legally access the internet, that would only be valid within the US, and you could legally and freely access it by going to any other country.
So in fact, rather than everything being equivalent to Apple's singular control, almost nothing is equivalent (really, only another company with a similarly closed ecosystem).
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#188This is one of the worst stories I’ve seen yet. It sounds like they were “all in” on Apple with zero backups, which shows some questionable judgment, but still, this sort of thing shouldn’t be possible any more than a bank deciding to take all your money with no recourse. (They can close your account, but they can’t keep your money.) Maybe hosts should be required to mail you a hard drive with your data on it when th…
I do have backups of most data, including photos, but there are things you can't backup like shared actively edited iWork documents, and things like that. I can rebuild from it, but it's still a shitshow and my very expensive devices are bricked.
What a nightmare - hope everything will end well.
Concerning all those 'bricked' devices it would be really nice to get some more details concerning the 'block'.
Can you use your iPhone to call someone, can you use your MacBook overall? Login, use Apple Passwords(!), looking at photos within photos app and so on...
Or are all those devices completely locked?
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#189Since your money is gone, I would file a complaint here: ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission): The primary enforcer of gift card laws, ensuring businesses comply with the three-year minimum expiry, clear terms, and fair practices.
Absolutely, but that doesn't solve my immediate issue of my devices and accounts, but of course I will do that.
It appears that the only way to reach Apple Customer Relations is by way of writing a formal letter to:
Apple Pty Ltd, PO Box A2629, Sydney South NSW 1235
Re: Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
#190It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account. But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email…
Unfortunately, when you access multiple accounts from the same set of IP addresses and browser signatures, you can bet Google, Apple, Microsoft, and any other large company with that level of information collection has probably correlated all of those accounts to you. The company may lock them all if any one of them is suspected of "bad behavior".
Yeah I dont remember the details but I remember a developer at a studio causing their account to lock up when google shut down the previous studio he was working woth account